The attentional mechanism of own-race bias: Evidence from the Stroop effect

Own-race bias in face recognition is a well-known phenomenon, with previous explanations focusing on perceptual expertise or social cognitive factors. However, few studies have directly examined how attentional mechanisms differ between own- and other-race faces. This study employed a face-word Stroop paradigm in four experiments to explore these differences. Experiment 1 was carried out with full attention, where upright faces were shown in Experiment 1a and inverted faces in Experiment 1b. Experiment 2, on the other hand, was conducted under divided attention, with upright faces presented in Experiment 2a and inverted faces in Experiment 2b. Results showed that own-race faces elicited a larger Stroop effect than other-race faces when upright, regardless of attention conditions. However, this advantage disappeared when faces were inverted, indicating the importance of holistic processing in own-race bias. Critically, when word presented on eyes, the Stroop effect for upright own-race faces was significantly increased under insufficient attentional resource condition, becoming comparable to upright other-race faces. These results suggest that own-race bias is influenced by both quantitative and qualitative differences in attentional engagement. This study offers a new attentional framework for understanding cross-race face recognition.